It perhaps befits a wilfully contrary artist that a bad review might act as the best advert imaginable for his new album. One august rock critic has already deemed Le Noise, his collaboration with U2 and Dylan producer Daniel Lanois, unlistenable. It's a response that should cause the ears of long-term Young fans to prick up. His worst records don't really incite that kind of violent reaction: they're just boring. Furthermore, someone like him said something like that at every vital moment in Young's career – from David Crosby's spluttering disbelief that he'd abandon CSNY for Crazy Horse, a band that "never should have been allowed to be musicians at all", to the yells of horror that greeted Tonight's the Night, to Graham Nash's response to 1988's return-to-raging-form Eldorado: "I absolutely hate this record." It's hard not to picture the august rock critic huffing away without thinking: "Hmm, this could be interesting."

Your interest might be piqued further not so much by Lanois's sonic approach – which largely sets Young's singing against the sound of his own ferociously distorted electric guitar, occasionally looping his voice to unsettling effect – but by the circumstances surrounding the album. While you don't want to wish the old guy any ill, contentment doesn't suit Neil Young, at least artistically. His best work – from 1974's On the Beach to 1995's Sleeps With Angels – has been born out of turmoil, and Le Noise arrives haunted. Filmmaker Larry Johnson, who collaborated with Young for four decades, died suddenly in January, while longstanding sideman Ben Keith died of a heart attack at Young's home in July. Judging by Le Noise's contents, their deaths seem to have simultaneously rattled and re-energised him.

Whatever the qualities of his recent fair-to-middling efforts – they all had their moments – his songwriting here sounds more pointed and self-aware than it has in years. "Walk with me," suggests Young on the album opener. A cynical voice – possibly belonging to Crosby, Stills, Nash or another musician who's enjoyed a mercurial relationship with him over the years – might note that this is a fairly resistible offer, given that walking with Neil Young almost invariably ends in Neil Young suddenly buggering off with someone else and abandoning you in the middle of nowhere. But Young is there before you: "I lost some people I was travelling with," he cries, sounding genuinely regretful, as the song dissolves into tumultuous feedback.

In recent years, Young has dipped into his vast catalogue of unreleased songs in order to prop up albums of uninspired latterday material, with inevitable results. The 25-year-old Ordinary People was so much better than anything else on Chrome Dreams II that it sparked glum thoughts. Even his material from the 80s – a decade when Young was widely presumed to have gone completely bananas, given that he spent it insisting A Flock of Seagulls were the future of music and worrying that Aids could be transmitted by touching potatoes that had been handled by gay men – was vastly superior to the contemporary stuff.

This time, however, an old song works, partly because it doesn't overshadow everything around it: Hitchhiker was written around the time of 1992's Harvest Moon, but fits far better here alongside Rumblin's dark intimations of nameless dread and the uncertainty and cynicism of Angry World than with Harvest Moon's aura of middle-aged contentment: "Everything's gonna be alright yeah," he sings, sounding exactly like the nervous, abrasive young man who screamed at his hippy fans to wake the fuck up in the early 70s. A weird lyric even by the standards of a man given to writing songs about riding a llama across Texas in order to smoke weed with Martians, it details the various drugs that Young took at different junctures in his career – "then I tried amphetamines" – before inexplicably bursting into the chorus of an entirely different song, Like An Inca. Perhaps he figured that, as Like An Inca came at the end of his synth-pop experiment, Trans, an album all but the doughtiest listener bails out of pretty quickly, no one would actually notice. Hitchhiker seems of a piece with two earlier slices of ponderous and troubled autobiography, 1970's Helpless and 1973's Don't Be Denied. But while the former found solace in the "dream comfort memories" of childhood, and the latter in Young's own obstreperousness, here there's no relief: just a despairing howl of bewilderment and fear at encroaching old age – "I've tried to leave my past behind, but it's catching up with me" – then Young's voice, spookily looped into incomprehension over a final, doomy chord.

Occasionally, the confusion and grief seems to overwhelm the songs: Love and War quickly establishes that Young has written a lodda songs about love and a lodda songs about war, but still doesn't understand either, then spends five trying minutes telling you that a lodda times. More often, however, it leads to something gripping and fresh and honest. Le Noise demands more effort than some listeners might be willing to put in, but at its best, it repays that effort pretty handsomely. In that sense at least, it pretty much sums up Neil Young's entire career.